Traditionally, people, individuals or professionals have maintained diaries or maintained (paper) records to memorialize activities such as family events, business activities or transactions in general or around a particular issue. But as more records are digitally created and maintained, printing each action and maintaining printouts as paper files have become more challenging. As digital records can also be more easily manipulated with digital editing applications, printouts cannot be trusted anymore because such printouts may have been manipulated prior to printing. Digital records include, for example, email, chat or social media sessions, documents, spreadsheets or other files created by various software applications. Even records which traditionally have been analog are increasingly created digitally or can be converted to digital format: phone conversations are being transmitted using digital Internet protocols using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); photos and videos are taken as digital pictures and motion files; music and voice mail are recorded as electronic files; video, chat, and audio streams can be stored as electronic files; and paper records can be scanned into digital images. Digital storage as an electronic file therefore provides a universal way to maintain records of any kind.
Archival of historic information may be useful in general to enable people to remember what they have been doing, and to enable people to share their experiences with others. In case of any type of dispute, records are often extremely important to resolve such dispute. Traditionally, paper records were sorted by date or organized into tabs or stacks of paper and enhanced with flags, sticky notes, highlighters, or notes on the margin or a separate piece of paper or separate documentation. Often none of this happened, and instead people just relied on the memory and knowledge of key individuals to understand the history of a particular transaction or relationship.
A need in the art therefore exists for a system and method that provides for storing any electronic file and for enhancing such files so that relevant files can be identified, displayed, analyzed, and shared.